Hi folks, I just had lunch after visiting several polling stations here in southern NH.
Some observations from voting myself, and waiting for friends and family to vote (hence the multiple locations).
So here if you are already registered for a party, you check in with ID and are automatically given the ballot for your party.
If you are undeclared (no party affiliation) you can choose either.
After voting people walk across the gym and put the ballot into the blue machine or the red machine.
My observations which were consistent at all places: There were more democrats voting in their primary than I expected. You know this because the ballot is very obviously blue or red colored on top. This is surprising given Biden is not on the ballot and moved the NH primary from no longer being first in the nation for democrats.
Here Trump was the very last person to vote for on the ballot so when people are walking from the booths to the machines it is easy to tell if they voted Trump, you can see the bottom bubble colored in, people just have the ballot out in the open, no spying necessary.
The democrats that switched parties before today in order to vote against Trump (ie Hailley) we’re out in force! This observed a few ways, you can see they voted for her in the same you can tell it was Trump on the bubble position. They also all had surgical masks on, it was like wearing a team jersey for these people. Then after submitting their Hailley votes in the red machines, instead of leaving like the Trump voters they go to a separate line to switch back to their party (or in this case to undeclared where they will then go back to dem prior to September for the local primaries).
Assuming everything is counted and not programmed, it should be interesting to see. There have not been many political signs out for the lead up to this (which is unusual) but of those out there for signage it’s like 80-90% Trump. The democrats Hailley support should give her a significant boost in the end but not enough to win and everyone will know she got mostly democrats votes anyway.
Normally I have seen it as a positive having been undeclared for most of my life I would vote in which ever party had a more interesting race but typically there is a contest going on for both parties. They tried to make it seem like Brandon ditching NH was a punishment for him coming in last place here in 2020 but the play has really been the strategy of having no real primary contest so the dems could switch sides and vote for whoever the deep state told them to as an antiTrump move, which ended up being Nimarata. So this is the first time I have seen it be abused for this type of shenanigans but now we know it can happen and changes should be made moving forward.